Jewish Involvement in the Art World[i]
The pain of
their psyches reverberated in my body almost as if it were mine.[ii]
This headnote from Eva Hoffman’s After
Such Knowledge opens up a whole area of discussion on the nature of Jewish
art, though as it has been said there may be grave questions about the
propriety and validity of poetry (or literature and the other arts in the
widest sense) following the Holocaust. To go through this relatively brief
statement we rush head first into the deepest problematics of an art, creativity,
and an aesthetic that has so often been denigrated and denied. In this, however, we don’t mean to imply that
the Holocaust was just one of many or merely the culminating extreme of pogroms
to be experienced in our own times; that would be to trivialize the event or,
which amounts to the same thing, to universalize it as a type of genocide. Instead, the Holocaust is so enormous in its
devastation, profound in its implications, and unique in its marshaling of the
resources and energies of modernity for the sole purpose of eradication of all
Jews and all traces of Jewish culture that it is the point in history which
defines all past attempts to persecute the Jews and hence the crystallization
of how Jewish memory works.
In the first place we find the word “pain”, and this asks us to consider
whether the so-lachrymose version of Jewish history can be found everywhere and
at all times in what may be collectively called Jewish culture, that is, from
ancient through medieval to modern times, in all zones of Jewish experience,
from Sephardic to Ashekenzi, Yemenite and Hellenistic, Diaspora and Israeli,
religious and secular. The specific
reference of “pain of their psyche” must be to the unique enormity of the
Shoah, but it also holds true for other traumatic events throughout Jewish
history—expulsions, destruction, persecution, slaughter. But the pain is not deadening, numbing, soul-murdering:
it reverberates. It lives on in
everything that is remembered, experienced, articulated, put into action,
rendered into form, color, sound, tangibility, conceived in ideas, discussed in
words. It also reverberates because it
stimulates past experiences, personal and private, as well as collective and
public. It does so “in my body,” says
Hoffman, with that body being more than her own; it is also the body—the
genetic materials, the patterns of upbringing and education, the socialization
of feelings and the institutionalization
of performance of the mitzvoth in
ceremonies, rituals, celebrations and mourning.
Such reverberations infuse the individual and collective body of those
who have survived the Shoah—directly as the children and grandchildren of those
who were murdered or displaced, indirectly as the whole of the Children of
Israel who inherit the memories and the responsibilities of continuity.
What is passed on, however, is not some generic material, some pattern
of the DNA, some essentialized archetypal images and concepts in the mind and
heart, but a way of receiving the feelings and passing them on “as if” they
were biological entities, in the “as if” of the Haggadah’s requirement that all
who participate treat the stories, gestures, sounds, formulaic attitudes that
shows we believe as true that we were there on the journey from Egypt through
the desert, standing beneath Sinai when the Law was given, and reached the
Promised Land together. It is in this
sense, I have argued for many years, that Jews midrash their own personal experiences by enhancing their
articulation, interpreting their signification and feeling deeply of what they
read, think about, discuss, debate, and seek to apply in order to keep to the
letter and the spirit of the Law. To midrash means to preserve, clarify
and give meaningful form to the memories of the past, integrate them into the
present by finding analogies and contexts that give them sense more than the
existential moment of the specific pain out of which everything else emanates.
Rather than being shackled by the Second Commandment into a world
without the visual and formed arts, as some historians persist in saying, Jews
participated in a particular version of creative activities appropriate to
their ancient conditions in the Middle East, as studies in archaeology
demonstrate. But the loss of the Second
Temple in 69 CE and the destruction of an independent state the next year with
the fall of Jerusalem led to a period of radical readjustments in Jewish
intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual concepts, as well as to the creation of a
rabbi-interpreted Law for a nation in exile dispersed throughout the
world. Continual mourning for the absent
cult of the Temple with its priestly observances, mounting pressure to distinguish
its outward forms of the dominant religions around it, and continual withdrawal
into the psychological experiences and expression of study, debate and
engagement with the energetic forces of the physical universe led to new kinds
of moral imagination and formal remembering.
But external persecution also shaped different kind of withdrawal into
postures of abjection and kept defiance in radical terms of exegetical
practice, that is, midrashing history and social life.
The rise of Christianity and its absorption into the Roman Empire also
created challenges to the integrity and identity of Judaism itself, forcing
Jews to live not only in a world-wide Galut
(exile) but also as a barely tolerated and often persecuted minority. Something similar, albeit with certain
significant differences, happened with the advent of Islam and its sweeping
victories of most North African and Middle Eastern states. Whereas Christianity, both Western and then
Eastern, developed elaborate iconographic forms of worship, including hieratic,
symbolic and representational art forms, Muslim sensibilities for the most part
eschewed liturgical practices based on imagery and depictions of the divine,
although symbolic forms, abstract patterns of design and magnificent architectural
structures were developed.
For reasons
of persecution and social confinement, Jews for the most part played a very
minor role in the development of European art through the Middle Ages, Renaissance
and Enlightenment. Inside their own communities, mostly in the Eastern nations
of Europe, they could at best express their creative talents only in what today
are termed the folk arts, decorations of small synagogues, and the production
of a few liturgical objects, such as Menorot, Sabbath Candle Sticks, and
curtains for the Torah Ark. In Sephardic and Italian communities, especially
among rich families, there was some wider range of good produced that could be
considered of aesthetic value. Yet it is
hard to tell what was done because so much was destroyed during periods of
oppression, lost in the process of migration occasioned by expulsion and
escape. On the other hand, Jewish
participation had two other outlets in the artistic trends of various periods
and in differing environment. One was the
role of craftsman, teacher and dealer on behalf of non-Jewish families and
courts; in this the artistry followed the dominant trends of the patrons and
the tastes of the other craft guilds and schools. The other, even more ambiguous, was the role
of patron, insofar as the middle-or upper-class Jewish family would commission
a Christian silversmith, weaver or painter, for instance, to make shape objects
to the specifications of liturgical functions or to depict types of characters,
animals or scenes of what was desired, leaving the style and techniques
basically up to the worker himself.
After
emancipation began in some western nations and assimilation got underway as
well, Jewish artists themselves began to appear, along with the other
associated professions, from dealers, gallery owners, museum directors,
critics, critics and scholars. For many
wealthy families, several other roles opened up.
Unable to play public roles in government and politics, such ambitious
and successful individuals sought to make their mark on the surrounding society
by patronizing artists and founding institutions for training others. In regard to the innovations of the
nineteenth century, where new ways of seeing and feeling were developed, as
well as enhancements of natural modes of perception and production through
chemical, mechanical and industrial processes, it fell to those men and women
who were not traditionally committed—or even allowed—to participate in the whole endeavor of art to support radical
trends, avant garde styles, and the development of new forms of art itself—photography
and cinema, for instance. But there were
also changes in taste that moved such previously undervalued crafts as porcelain
making, silk weaving, importation of exotic flowers, as well as innovations in
creating new ranges of colors, printing wallpaper, weaving carpets by machine,
and using steel, glass and ceramics in architecture.
To come to
the question of dealers and collectors whose assembly of paintings, etchings,
prints and other modes of visual arts in discussion because of the hoard found
in Cornelius Gerlitt’s apartment in Munich, the important role of Jewish
families moves to the fore. By breaking
up the original collections without due consideration of provenance and patronage
the Nazis, and all those who collaborated with them in the destruction, looting,
forced sales, and confiscations. The history of art was distorted. Thus, while as we shall see later, there is
no question that theft and restitution, crime and punishment, and ethical
considerations matter deeply, what I want to emphasize here is that what Hitler
and his cronies tried to do—and seems to have succeeded in many instances—is to
wipe the place of Jewish taste and knowledge of the arts from European cultural
history.
The evidence of a Litvak School
in Paris in the early twentieth century needs to be brought back into focus,
and as something of more significance than a local phenomenon of interest only
to Jewish historians. The connoisseurship
of families such as the Ephrussi and the Rothschild needs to be appreciated
again as more than a matter of how Jewish wealth was displayed, but rather as a
means of explaining where and how and when general trends in the development of
modern art were effected. That an
architect like Adolf Loos came to depend more than just on the Jewish
businesses and private individuals who commissioned his work to bring into
existence a whole new way of conceiving architecture and reshaped attitudes
towards decoration, but also that he chose as his main students and
collaborators young Jewish students who developed his ideas and brought his
plans to many cities of Europe, North America and beyond. Even seemingly more humble enterprises, such
as the organization of the import of Oriental art into Paris and Berlin by
Sigmund Bing and his associates, their opening of a shop in Paris called Art
Nouveau, which gave its name to a whole movement in taste, and the workshops
established with it to provide the space, equipment and means of selling to
this movement, need to be recognized as central to the whole shift in sensibilities
evidence in the past century. Picasso,
Matisse, Klimt and hundreds of other modern artists became what they did
through Jewish patrons and Jewish friends who introduced them and their work to
large circles of potential purchasers. In
brief, the restitution needed goes beyond that of returning stolen goods to
their last legal owners or families or of providing financial compensation for
what was destroyed or lost; it also means rectifying grave errors and gaps in
the history of modern European culture.
Some things cannot be valued in dollars and sense, and there is
therefore a whole range of moral and ethical issues involved.
[i] This section develops a long
a path parallel to that recently covered in my “Jewish Symbolism and Art” (Part 1, 4 November
2013; Part 2, 5 November; Part 3, 6
November ; Part 4, 7 November; Part 5, 8
November; Part 6, 9 November; Part 7, 10 November ; Part 9, 11 November) East European Jewish History and Retrievals,
Preservations and Speculations.
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